Monday, November 10, 2014

One of the ways in which technologists and
bureaucrats and politicians merge is to project the world in terms of their
mutually supporting vision. This is a view that is imposed from above, and
speaks of industrialisation as eo-equivalent with development. The unfortunate
aspect of this, is ofcourse, that people’s movements are not taken into
account. An elite group, which consists of policy makers decide that the only
way to feed the masses is through industrialised agriculture. This is as much
an ideological plank as organising communes for the peasantry inearly 20th century Soviet Russia.
When two and a half acres per farmer is seen by the policy makers to be
economically unviable, then the industrialising State decides that the
peasantry should first be squeezed out from its holdings, rendered
impoverished, and farming made out to be an anachronism. Once it has done this,
by not setting up the infrastructure for the survival of traditional farmers,and killing them off, it then plans that the
country should be geared to colonise Mars. All this is the scientific vision of
those who do not enjoy the fruits of the land, which the tiller does in an
immediate way. The elite plan that the local haats or markets be done away with,
and then multinational companies are called in to expedite the marketing of
goods. Those who stand in the way of these technocratic policies are
calledGandhians, a fuzzy term which
does not mean much any more.Once the decision to industrialise is defended as a
shared vision, then the standardisation principle represents itself as a
historical moment. “We must move towards the future”. Now this future is a
fabricated one, as many in Europe and America have interestingly, returned to
the dream of organic farming.

The technologists’ dream exists only in the
minds of the elite cadres, who want more electricity to fuel this dream. They
already wear acrylic clothes, eat imported foods, drink expensive wines and
genuine Scotch, live in airconditioned hotels and homes. Nothing about their
lifestyle matches the lives of 80 percent of the population. Though they
promise this vast rural based population all kinds of things, during the
elections, in reality they remain emotionally estranged from the people. Regardless
of political party, the technologists, bureaucrats and politicians are people
who are hand in glove with one another. Their very perspectives are outlined by
the way in which they engage with the people. Intellectuals become the bane of
this group because they continually disturb the equilibrium of the status quo.
Why are the BJP and the Congress so similar, we may ask in their actions to the
Minorities, to Education, to De-Militarization? What was the sum allocated to
the Education Budget and the Defence Budget? These are the rational questions
that are posed to the Ministries and to their incumbents but we get no answers.

Agriculture is a way of life. It is about
seasons and rituals, about the incandescence of hope and fulfilment. Thereareequally, lean periods and losses, famines and excesses. The seeming
rupture of tradition, because of globalisation, creates new avenues of work and
new forms of consumption. The people are socialised into new mores and look for
education as the way in which they may be liberated from the crises in
agriculture. The paradox of industrialisationbeing wedded to traditional ideologies producesa new worldview. Out of these come the
normlessness of the wandering hordes, that homeless and rootless, become a
growing menace to societies. Manuel Castells, the Mexican Sociologist in the
1980s, called it that disorder, which is the “order of capitalism”. Arising
from the disruption of the countryside, lies the rise of urbanisation and the
service sectors, the last of which provide domestic and occupational services
to the inhabitants. Smart cities can arise only from dispossessing the people
of what they have in the rural hinterlands. The World Bank will support the
multinational and the State’s call to industrialisation because that is what
they are financially trained to do. So they will turn a deaf ear to the farmers
who do not want their rivers dammed. These are farmers who believe that the
rivers are sacred, and seek to protect the rights of riverine civilisation.
Ideologically, the river is host to farmers, fishers, men and women from
different parts of India and the world. By damming the rivers, for electricity
production to the cities, the flora and fauna are destroyed, and food growing,
as much as fishing, as much as ritual and tourist activities are threatened.
Sludge from the dams, and the expressive authoritarian control of the running
waters causes great damage to the ecosystem. Are the malls and the consumption
needs of 21st century urbanites really necessary at the cost of the
genocide of the peasantry?

1 comment:

In Malcolm Gladwell's book "Outliers", he makes a mention of rice paddy fields in China. "A village in China of fifteen hundred people might support itself entirely with 450 acres of land, which in the American Midwest would be the size of a typical family farm." (Chapter 8 - "Rice Paddies and Math Tests", Page 232)

He goes on to say that historically, Western agriculture is mechanically oriented, so in order to increase yield, more and more sophisticated equipments are needed. Whereas in China and Japan, rice farmers use the limited land more effectively, by becoming smarter and making better choices.